On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 8:59 PM, Nicolas Mailhot <nicolas.mailhot@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > In practice you can approximate cubic splines by just cutting cubic > segments in many quadratic ones, which font editors like fontforge do > automatically, and at the sizes text is typically rendered there's no > visible difference. > > But after years of marketing on the subject some users are convinced > transformation to quadratic for fonts designed with cubic splines is a > quality loss. Indeed. I was one that believed there would be a difference, but even at 512 display size, I don't see a single pixel that differs. Screenshots here: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/attachment.cgi?id=312489 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/attachment.cgi?id=312491 On the other hand, CFF and TFF use different hinting mechanisms, and there a visible difference at small (10-12) point sizes, even on Windows. On the TTF vs. CFF issue, Adam Twardoch, one of the FontLab's managers (don't let this make you think he's all marketingspeak) has some insightful comments here: http://www.typophile.com/node/16695#comment-99516. My summary of his position is that TrueType in in OpenType packaging should genrally be prefered to OpenType/CCF as an end-user delivery method, all other features being equal. Unfortunately, on Fedora we also have a more complex hinting issue: Apple has a patent on TrueType hinting, so TT hinting is off by default (there's a Livna package to enable it). Also, most free fonts like Linux Libertine store the manually produced PostScript hinting in their sfd file (I checked with Philipp), and the TT hinting is generated in FontForge just before the TTF is exported. So my guess is that the CFF hinting is likely to be better, since it's hand-made. I need to do a few more test on this though... _______________________________________________ Fedora-fonts-list mailing list Fedora-fonts-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-fonts-list
